Poet From A ‘Clean, Lean And Hungry Country’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31318, 14 March 1967, Page 2

Poet From A ‘Clean, Lean And Hungry Country’

(By

ISLA STUART)

CANBERRA.

Since 1854, when Australia’s first woman novelist, Katherine Helen Spence, published “Clara Morrison”, a tale of the goldfields, women have contributed substantially to Australian literature.

Some, such as Ethel Turner, Henry Handel Richardson, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant, Mary Gilmore, Thea Astley and Rosemary Dobson have won recognition as novelists or poets in international letters as well as in their own country.

But of the hundreds of women whose work has enriched Australian writing probably none enjoys a wider, or better deserved, esteem than the poet, Judith Wright In 1958, after the publication of her first two books of verse, an eminent critic, the late H. M. Green, described Judith Wright as “among the first of living poets, in Australia or elsewhere.” In November, 1966, after the publication of her seventh collection of poetry, another prominent Australian eritie, R. F. Brissenden, wrote: “She is now, both in prose and poetry, one of our most

distinguished writers.” Judith Wright, the woman, is as rare and remarkable as Judith Wright, the poet

Small and slender with short-cropped, greying hair and lively hazel eyes, she has the unassuming friendliness and firm handshake of a country woman—which she is, by choice and by birth.

With her teen-age daughter, Meredith, she lives In a modest well-kept house on the slopes of Mount Tamborine in southern Queensland. Her husband, J. P. McKinney, who was also a writer, died at the end of 1966.

Rainfall is much higher at Mount Tamborine than in most parts of Australia, and the countryside is green with a tropical richness of plants, animals and birds. The McKinneys’ rather overgrown garden is a sanctuary for all creatures, even snakes. Judith Wright has a passionate love of nature and is a stout fighter for the conservation of Australia's unique plant and animal life. She is a councillor of the Australian Conservation Foundation and president of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. She is also an honorary ranger of a small jungle-covered national park not far from where she lives.

Exploring this park with Judith Wright is an unforgettable experience. She knows every plant and tree by its botanical name and her «s understanding with the every one of which she seems to know intimately, recalls lines from one of her poems:

Released from the dawn of leaves, from the fiery nett A bird went up from the tree on delighted wingt.

One of her books of verse is about birds and her delight in them is always evident This love of nature is part of Judith Wright's heritage. She was born in 1915 on the cold, high northern tablelands of New South Wales where her father’s people had been pioneers five generations earlier. Her mother’s family, too, were farmers for generations, and her love of the country pulsates through much of her verse.

In her first book, “The Moving Image,” which created universal critical applause when it was published in 1946,

she expresses this deep feeling often as, for example, in the opening lines of the poem “South Of My Days”: South of mu taga* circle, part of my blood's country Rise. that tableland, high delicate outline Of bong slopes wincing under the winter, Low trees blue-leaved and olive, outcropping graniteclean, lean, hungry country. . . Judith Wright’s childhood was spent in that clean, lean, hungry country where, she says, “Cattle and sheep were the first things I remember apart from falling off horses, which I have done consistently ever since.” Her home was far from schools and she did her lessons by correspondence until she was old enough to go to a boarding school. Later she went to the University of Sydney and then to Europe for a year. Back in Australia she took a secretarial course and worked as a stenographer in Sydney until 1942 when, with her brothers away fighting in the Second World War, she went home to work on the land. Later she worked for

the Universities’ Commission in Brisbane and helped with the production of the small, but internationally esteemed, Australian literary periodical, “Meanjin.” In 1949, when her reputation as a poet was firmly established with two books of verse, “The Moving Image” and “Woman To Man,” she was awarded an Australian Commonwealth Literary Fund Scholarship to write “The Generations Of Men,” a biography in novel form of her pioneering ancestors. This established her as prose writer as well as a poet. Today Judith Wright, with 13 books of verse and prose and a variety of essays published, stands high in the world of letters. Two Australian universities have conferred honorary doctor of letters degrees on her and in 1964 she was the first writer to receive a 10,000-dollar Britannica Award, an American grant for outstanding contributions by Australians to art, education, literature, medicine and science.

These honours sit lightly on Judith Wright’s shoulders. She is undoubtedly a distinguished poet with, as H. M. Green said, “Life singing through her veins in music.” But she is also a modest, down-to-earth country woman concerned with looking after her family; taking an active part in community affairs, particularly those concerned with conservation; cooking; gardening; feeding the fowls and doing many other household chores very well indeed.

These housewifely skills were acquired, she once said, by being brought up by a grandmother “with a terrible conscience about elbow grease, small stitches, beating butter and sugar to a real cream and keeping accounts.” In everything she does the practical housewife is never far from the sensitive poet. Her first purchase with the prize money from her Brittanies Award for Literature, for example, was a gleaming new bath to replace the rather old one.